Tropica is on the equator, and Iceland is below the Arctic Circle (there are permanent icepacks, north and south, that aren’t on the map). The rest could be desert or jungle or paved from coast to coast. We won’t know much more, except for better outlines, until about three weeks before we arrive. Three weeks!

Coordinator-elect Dznowski asked me to cobble together a VR simulation of the planet so that people could “start getting used to it.” Hully golly gee. I asked her whether she’d rather I made it a rain forest or a metropolis. She said well, use your imagination, dear. Dear! I’m older than her father, who used to work for Dan. It will be a few generations before this crypto confusion wears off.

It will wear off when the last one of us dies.

So I asked around and wound up in conference with Robert Tyree, a planetary astronomer with a bushy beard and prehensile eyebrows. Very nice man, actually, but he’s so damned intense about astronomy that he can back you across a room talking about atmospheric gradients.

He did sympathize with my problem: the odds of coming up with a simulation that actually resembled Epsilon were right up there with being dealt a perfect bridge hand. Trees that look like bright red broccoli sprouts oozing orange marmalade, why not? Wingless birds that fly with carefully controlled and highly poisonous farts. So what we had to come up with was a cartoon planet, a template with the right gravity, temperature, color, and brightness of sunlight. Let people go in and close their eyes and use their own imaginations.

It was odd being in VR conjunction with a man I hardly knew. His dick hangs to the right, unlike Dan’s or John’s, I guess because he’s lefthanded. His beard feels funny. When he looks at his feet, it touches his throat.

He’s done a lot of VR in surreal modes, more even than I have, so he was really good at holding one aspect fixed while shifting another. We had the gravity as a given constant. Everything else we could fiddle with: hold the illumination level while changing the color mix; hold the air temperature while changing the humidity. I came up with one of those somatic flashes you sometimes have, and was able to make the feel of the air exactly what it had been on the beach, Guam, winter 2085. Salty, sultry, thick. Probably full of pheromones.

I got an odd feedback from him on that, something resembling awe. He was many generations removed from anyone who’d actually stood on a planetary surface, and planets were his life work, his passion. Yet he’d never even seen one.